New From Here, page 22
“Later works!” I tell Mom, glancing at my siblings. “I have something important… er… to do for school before then anyway.”
“So when are they gonna decide? The company in New York?” Bowen asks.
“Any day now!” she says.
I cross my fingers and my toes. It’s one thing not to have healthcare in normal times; it’s another thing altogether not to have it in a pandemic. That reminds me. “Are we officially in a pandemic?” I ask Mom.
“If we are, we can’t fly back, right?” Lea asks. “We’d have to get those dinosaur suits!”
Mom raises an eyebrow in the mirror. She doesn’t confirm that we’re in a pandemic, but she doesn’t unconfirm it either. Instead, she tells us not to worry, she’s going to talk to Dad again tonight. We’re staying put for now. I race out of the car when we get back, determined to land Dad his first job offer before the situation gets even worse.
* * *
“You sure you want to do this?” Bowen asks me one last time as I hold his phone, ready to make the call to Oakhill Country Club. “Because I’ll totally do it.”
“Or me! Why can’t I do an interview?” Lea says, jumping up and down for the phone.
“I got this,” I say. I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans and press call. Mr. Anderson from the Oakhill Country Club answers on the second ring. Here goes…
“Hello? Mr. Anderson? Hi, I’m Andrew Evans,” I say, clearing my throat and putting on my Star Wars Jedi voice. I put Mr. Anderson on speakerphone.
“Thanks for calling, Andrew,” Mr. Anderson says. “I’m looking at your résumé and it says here you are currently a lawyer. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“So why do you want to be a country club supervisor?”
Bowen gestures to me, Go on. “Uh… well, I love countries,” I laugh nervously. “And clubs!”
“But have you had any experience working in one?”
My siblings’ heads jiggle up and down. But I decide to answer honestly.
“No,” I say. “But I have experience working with tight deadlines and managing my time. And dealing with very demanding clients.” I glance at Bowen. “And very demanding kids.”
The last part makes Mr. Anderson chuckle. “You too, huh? Mine are a handful,” he says. “The other day my son ate all the cereal, then filled the box up with paper clips.”
“Mine decided to hold a garage sale and sold my wife’s anniversary earrings!”
“Oh no!”
“For a quarter!”
Mr. Anderson laughs.
“And what was your reaction, just out of curiosity?” he asks.
“I told them they had to find them and get them back.”
“And did they?”
“Yup!” I say proudly, smiling at my siblings. “They’re real smart kids.” It’s fun pretending to be Dad, bragging about us.
“Well, I applaud you. I wish everyone who worked here was as calm and even-keeled as you. Lord knows we certainly have some clients who can be pretty difficult sometimes,” Mr. Anderson says. “Tell you what, why don’t you come in for an interview, face-to-face.”
“Really?” I ask, then quickly correct myself. “I mean, great. Thank you so much.” I turn to my siblings. Lea’s got her hand over her mouth like she’s trying hard not to squeal. Bowen gives me a thumbs-up sign.
“I’ll have my secretary, Martha, set something up. Looking forward to meeting you, Andrew,” Mr. Anderson says before he hangs up. “And good luck with your kids!”
I throw my arms up when I get off the phone. I DID IT!!!
Chapter 81
YESSSS!” Bowen, Lea, and I cheer. “Dad’s gonna get a job!”
As I toss Bowen back his phone, he holds out his hand to me. “Guess you’re better at interviewing than me,” he offers. I look up in surprise.
“Not everything’s a competitive sport,” I tell my brother as I shake his hand.
It takes Bowen a second to digest my words. When he does, his whole body relaxes and he smiles.
Lea throws us a pillow. “But you guys! How are we going to get Dad here for the interview?” she asks.
I crawl under our bunk bed to retrieve our Ziploc bag of money from the garage sale. As I count out the money, Bowen gets on his computer to see what the cost of a flight is now.
“Good news! I found a one-way ticket from Hong Kong for only a thousand dollars,” Bowen says. “But Dad has to go through LA.”
“Through LA??” I ask. “What happened to the flights to SFO?”
“They’re all cancelled.”
Things are changing so quickly. We better hurry or pretty soon there will be no planes to anywhere!
“We have a hundred and ninety dollars here,” I tell my siblings, visualizing the math in my head—1,000 airplane parking spaces and 190 planes. “We’ll need eight hundred ten dollars if we want to get Dad over here!”
“How are we going to do that?” Bowen asks as Mom calls out to us that it’s time to go to Lucky’s.
Bowen hollers back, “We’ll be right there.”
“We could hold another garage sale!” Lea suggests. I shake my head. At those prices, we’d have to hold five, and besides, Mom is running out of shoes.
“I have a better idea,” I say.
Chapter 82
After Mom drops us off in front of Lucky’s, I tell my brother and sister my idea of helping Christopher deliver food. We have bikes and nothing to do after school. We could be his delivery crew and make tips for our Dad fund!
“But what about the virus?” Lea asks. “We can’t be biking all over town!”
“Hear me out,” I say as we push our cart into Lucky’s.
But before I can explain my plan, I crash my cart into the stampede of people inside the store. Lucky’s is packed! The shelves are completely empty. Almost everything inside the store is gone!
“Lea, you get the pasta! Grab whatever you can get!” Bowen calls out, jumping into action and getting another cart. “I’ll get the pasta sauce and the rice. Knox, you grab the toilet paper, soap, and trash bags!”
“What about meat?” I ask Bowen, gazing over at the crowd of people in the meat section.
Bowen thinks for a second, then decides, “Nah. Meat’s not gonna last. Besides, it’s too expensive. Let’s just get stuff we can keep for a long time.”
“On it!” my sister says, bolting for the pasta aisle.
I head toward the toilet paper section, staring at the line of customers, which stretches from the cashier counter all the way to the meat section! There are people with entire carts full of cheese. I’ve never seen so much wine! Or eggs—cartons and cartons of eggs, like someone’s about to make an omelet the size of a strip mall.
“Grab whatever you can!!!” people scream throughout the store. “Go! Go! Go!”
“But all that’s left is SPAM!!!” one woman says.
“GET THAT SPAM!!! I DON’T CARE!!!” her husband calls back.
I push my cart toward the toilet paper aisle, squeezing in between all the people. I hope there’s still some left.
But the aisle is completely cleared out. Not a single roll of toilet paper is left. Not even a square.
I look around and spot a woman hugging ten giant packages of toilet paper rolls in her cart. They’re stacked so high, they go up way past her head. I walk up to her and ask, “Excuse me, could I maybe have one of those?”
“No!” she says. “These are mine!”
“You need this much toilet paper?” I ask her.
The woman pushes her cart away from me in anger, without answering.
I turn and scan the rest of the aisle. Think. Christopher’s voice pops into my head—Sometimes you just need to look at a problem a different way to solve it. What else can we use? I roll my cart up and down the aisles, grabbing gift-wrapping tissue paper, baby wipes, even coffee filters. Hey, if it’s wipe-able, I’ll take it!
By the time I’m finished, Bowen and Lea are already standing in line. I look down at their carts. Lea managed to grab fifteen packages of pasta, though most of them are alphabet pasta. Bowen made off with a bag of rice and eighteen jars of peanut butter. I’m slightly worried about how much all the stuff is going to cost—Mom still hasn’t gotten her new job yet—but mostly excited we’re not going to starve.
“There was no more pasta sauce,” Bowen sighs. He looks in my cart. “What happened to the toilet paper?”
“They were all out.”
He reaches into my cart. “So you got coffee filters?!”
“Hey! It’s better than nothing! We don’t know how long the situation’s going to last!”
Mom comes in through the double doors and spots us in line. “I’m back! Oh my goodness, look at this line!” she exclaims.
The weirdest thing happens when Mom gets in line with us. The two people ahead of us both get out of the line and push their cart all the way to the back of the line. One guy uses his baseball cap to cover his mouth and nose until he’s safely around white people again.
Mom’s jaw drops. “Oh my God, are you serious?” she asks. “You’d rather start all over waiting in line than stand in front of us?” She loses it at this point. “Look around you! We are literally contemplating a future of wiping our butts with coffee filters.” She reaches into my cart and grabs the coffee filters. “And I’m the scariest thing to you right now?”
“We just want to be on the safe side,” the man in the baseball cap calls from the back.
“You want to be on the safe side?” Mom asks. “Don’t be mean and racist. Try that.”
To our surprise, several people in line start clapping for Mom. I look up to see African American and Latinx families clapping, echoing my mom. A Black woman calls out that she stands with her. One Latinx mother tells Mom someone in her community got turned away from a grocery store and it’s not right. Mom gets so emotional, she reaches for a coffee filter to wipe her eye.
I glance over at my brother, who looks around at all the people standing up against racism. We might not have gotten any toilet paper today. But we filled up on the knowledge that we were not all alone.
Chapter 83
Later in the car, after all the groceries have been loaded, Mom is quiet.
“Are you okay?” Lea asks.
Mom nods, even as she lets out a sob. There are no tears. Just the dry swell of hurt.
“I’m so sorry, you guys,” she says. “I really thought bringing you three over here would keep us safe. If I had known all this was going to happen—”
“It’s okay,” we say to Mom.
“No it’s not okay. I wanted so badly for things to be different for you. I’m supposed to keep you safe and secure,” she says. “That’s my job. To protect you from having to experience what you just did.”
I bite my lip, looking over at Mom. I know how much it pains her that we had to see those people rush to get away from us because of the color of our skin. But what she doesn’t know is we’ve already experienced it. In our own way. And we found the courage to stand up and ICEE it, just like she did.
“You can’t protect us forever, Mom,” I say. “No offense, but you’re not that powerful.”
Mom lets out a small smile.
“And look at all those people who echoed us!” my brother says, smiling at me.
“It was something, wasn’t it?” Mom agrees. “I never told you this, but remember the restaurant Lao Lao and Lao Ye worked at? It was vandalized once. Someone graffitied racist slurs on the walls.”
We gasp. Lea reaches for my hand. No wonder Lao Lao and Lao Ye wanted to go back to Beijing.
“It was heartbreaking,” Mom says. “But you know something? A cleaning crew showed up the next day and helped wash away the graffiti—for free. A local rabbi came and put down flowers. Local singers and musicians started performing outside, to show their support.” Her eyes glisten. “Words of hate will always be overpowered by words of love.”
I smile.
“Well, I have lots of words of love.” Lea beams, shaking up a box of alphabet pasta.
Mom turns to us and stretches out her arms to give us a hug from her seat. “I’m so proud of you guys. I wish your dad could be here to see how much you’ve grown. Thanks for being such troopers in a tough situation, even when we have no toilet paper.”
“Well, thankfully we have these,” Bowen says, pulling out the boxes of coffee filters. I laugh through my tears.
Chapter 84
Over the next few days, as we try and conserve our toilet paper and Mom waits anxiously for the company in New York to tell her whether she got the job, I think about what Mom said about how the vaccine for racism is love. I decide to flood Nextdoor with kind messages.
To my surprise, so many strangers online echo my words, expressing their thanks and appreciation for the small businesses in our community, especially Black, Latinx, and Asian American small businesses affected by the pandemic. And giving their love and support to all the workers on the front lines of the pandemic, risking their lives so that we can all stay safe.
I copy and paste some of the messages and send them to Dad. He calls me later that week.
“I talked to Mom,” he says. “I understand the situation. You kids might be scared to fly right now.…”
“It’s not just that.” I shake my head into the phone. I take a deep breath. “I don’t want to leave. My best friend’s here! I’m finally doing well in school, and I love my teacher.…”
“But buddy, California is in a state of emergency. I’m worried about you all over there,” Dad sighs. “And I just… I really miss you guys. You’re all I have in the world.”
Dad’s voice breaks slightly, and it dawns on me that as hard as the last few weeks have been for us, moving countries, starting a new school, and trying to find a job, it’s even harder for Dad going through a pandemic alone.
“But if you don’t want to come back right now because of the virus, I understand,” he says.
I swallow hard. I wish Dad would understand it’s not because of the virus. It’s because I refuse to give up on us all being together. Here. In our homeland. As flawed as it is. As hard as it is. This is still my country. And I don’t want to just give up on it. I want to stay and make it better.
“I miss you, too, Dad,” I say, gripping the phone with all my might.
Chapter 85
Bowen is in the kitchen early Saturday morning, disinfecting the rice package and the peanut butter jar, as the news blasts that the number of coronavirus cases in the US has jumped to 444, with nineteen people dead.
“This thing is spreading so fast!” Bowen says as he rubs sanitizer on the last jar of peanut butter. “Thank goodness we bought all that rubbing alcohol!”
“There’s something else we gotta buy!” I say, sitting down at Mom’s computer and trying to guess her Amazon password.
Before I can log in, Mom bursts into the kitchen with her phone in her hand. “Guess what, you guys?? I got the job!!!”
* * *
Our house is rich with celebration and laughter that weekend as Mom makes us peanut butter cookies, Bowen and I clean the house, and Lea steams Mom’s old work clothes that Dad sent over, so she’ll have the nicest blouses on Zoom. Dad FaceTimes with Mom to say congratulations.
“I’m glad the NYC trip paid off, though it was such a huge risk to go,” Dad says. “But I’m proud of you. When do you start?”
Mom tells him she’s starting on Monday. Though the company has a small San Francisco office, due to the virus concerns she’ll be working remotely.
“What about when school closes?” Dad asks. “Have you thought about that?”
“Schools are not going to close,” Mom tells him, even though the rumors are getting louder and louder. Just last week, we had a substitute because Mrs. Turner had to go to meetings to help the district plan for remote learning.
“I hope schools don’t close again,” I say to my brother. “I don’t want to have to go back to doing online homework.”
I think about my A– test on the wall next to my bed. Just when I was starting to do well!
Then Bowen says something that knocks the socks off me.
“I’ll help you,” he says. “It’ll be different this time. We’ll make a schedule.”
Lea and I share a glance—Who are you and what have you done with our brother, Bowen? We follow Bowen upstairs, where he puts on “Survivor” from his computer.
As the song blasts from the speaker, I smile. Maybe we can survive online school.
Mom hears us as we’re singing and gets off the phone with Dad. She walks upstairs.
“Does this mean we get to stay?” I ask her.
“We get to stay, bao bao!” Mom smiles.
“And we finally have health insurance?”
“YES!”
At the confirmation that we’ll finally be able to see a doctor in this country, I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. All this time, I have been blocking out in my head what would happen if any of us got sick. Trying not to think about it. Trying to convince myself it’s not going to happen, while secretly worrying life is going to Cruyff turn us. As the relief washes over me, Lea dances to “Survivor.” I watch from the top of the staircase, too emotional to dance. I rock my body back and forth with relief.
Chapter 86
On Mom’s first day at her new job, she wakes us up at the crack of dawn.
“Hurry up!” she says, getting us out of bed, wearing a crisp white shirt and black slacks. Her hair’s all up in a bun and she’s got makeup on. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad Winter Mom’s back.
Lea comes bouncing into our room, all dressed up herself. She nods approvingly at Mom’s work outfit. “Girl, you look great !” she says.
